LifeHacks
Things that make life easier, or automate certain tasks
This time it’s not a single keyboard shortcut. There’s a little known feature of ReSharper, called To-Do Items. It’s a series of tags, you can define, and when you put them in your comments somewhere in the code, ReSharper will pick the comment up and put it, in the To-Do Explorer Window. There are 3 predefined tags: TODO, BUG, NOTE and NotImplemented which picks up the NotImplementedException occurrences in your code. Yes, this is not a code comment, but most of the time you’ll use comments only. So how is this useful and boosts productivity? As you...
Since my Keyboard shortcut of the week post spawned some positive reactions and requests to continue it on a regular basis... well, here we go.
This week's productivity tip of the week is actually a keyboard shortcut as well, this time however it's ReSharper specific (you should do yourself a favor and get ReSharper anyway, if you don't use it). It's for Visual Studio' keymap.:
ALT + SHIFT + L
What it does is it highlights the location of currently active file in the Solution Explorer. It's very useful if you explore codebase, navigate between calls and want to quickly find out where...
My team at work is far from agile, but I’m trying to smuggle some ideas and practices, according to the old Latin proverb “gutta cavat lapidem, non vi, sed saepe cadendo”. Recently, as a small way of continuous improvement I suggested each week we print some Visual Studio or ReSharper keyboards shortcut, that we didn’t know or use, and which can help us do some things a little bit faster. Here’s the first one: It’s pinned to a cork whiteboard in a location that everyone looks at it few times a day. Hopefully by...
[UPDATE2] This tool has been deprecated. I leave the download links as they are, but if you want to interact with Twitter from within Launchy you better check out updated version of this tool here. [UPDATE] I uploaded a binary version of the tool, for those who don’t want/can’t deal with source code. Grab it here. I've been using Twitter for few days now, and I've tried quite a few options to use it. Currently I've settled on three different ways of interaction with the services (excluding browsing its website) When...
ALT.NET discussion group is quite active. There are around 1700, to over 2000 posts per month. It's easy to drown in the flood of information, and if you want to benefit from the group you need to develop a strategy. Here's mine: I use Thunderbird, as my email client, and for the group as well. In its basic form, it's not so well suited for the job of handling threaded discussion, but same as Firefox - you can expand its capabilities with extensions. The first thing to do, even before you go looking for extensions...
Tool for managing windows services in Windows XP allows you many things, but you can't unregister (delete, remove) a service with it. There is however a command line tool that allows that. Remember that unregistering important services may break your system. If you aren't sure what you're doing - don't. You have been warned. First you need to check real name of the service (not it's display name). To do this go to Control Panel-->Administrative Tools-->Services, and find the service you want to uninstall. Right click it, and choose "Properties". Then, on the "General" tab, find "Service Name"....
I have contact with lots of different software. However yesterday I came across an application, that completely blew my mind... in a negative sense. This particular application uses its own custom file format, that is basically zip, with special files and folders inside, much like Open XML and Open Office file formats work. What's different however, is that it requires you to have WinZip installed in order for it to work. And by WinZip, I mean WinZip, not just some generic compressing/decompressing program that supports zip format. This thing is so ridiculous that I just don't know what to say....
I sometimes come across a website that pops up a window with some video, chat or something, but its size is fixed, and it doesn't fit in it, when opened in Firefox. I used to move that tab to the main window, where I'm able to resize it, but I don't like doing that. I want to be able to resize that stubborn window in the first place, so I found a way to do just that. It only requires three simple steps: write about:config in your address bar, and hit enter find dom.disable_window_open_feature.resizable double-click it in order to...
Jeff Atwood in one of his recent posts stated: If you're really using your computer, your desktop should almost never be visible. I think this is an overstatement. If you're really using your computer, your desktop should be your command center. I agree with Jeff, that stuffing your desktop with lots of icons, shortcuts, documents etc is not basically a good idea. It makes your desktop a mess, and its hard to command if you have a mess in your command center. I try, as a rule of thumb, to not exceed the number of 10 files on my...
I've been using Regionerate for some time, and I'm addicted to it. Literally when I have to write some code on a computer that doesn't have Regionerate installed I feel odd. This tool is simply pure honey and nuts. Only thing I would change is it's default keyboard mapping (ctrl+R for running it), because it collides with Visual Studio/ReSharpers "Refactor" shortcut. So every time I install it I have to go to VS settings and change it to something else (alt+3 at the moment).
Main reason for this post however is not to praise Rauchy and his tool, but to...
I came to work today, only to see that my PC was restarted, when I left it running with some files open (thankfully saved). I learned from little nice green shield in my tray that it downloaded some updates and needed to restart so... it did. Automatic update is a great feature, as long as it works as I expect it to, and I expect it to never restart my PC without my explicit permission! I found it kind of odd, that my PC at work restarted automatically, while my home PC never does it. I did some digging and here's...
Well, maybe it's not the best title since I'm going to write not only about extensions I've been using for long long time, but new (for me) as well. Grab and Drag is one of the latter, I've been using it for only several hours and I simply loved it. It does basically what it's name says - enables you to scroll web pages how you would scroll PDF documents in Acrobat Reader. It doesn't block links, you can set hot key for temporary disabling this feature, you can make it switch between 'hand drag' and 'normal' mode after double click and...
One thing I LOVE about Firefox the most is tons of great extensions. I try to stay on top of things and once a while I dive into Mozilla's extensions repository to see if there have been some good additions. I test those that look promising, and during those few years since I started using Firefox I collected some that I can not imagine surfing without (alphabetic order).
Adblock Plus - a must-have for everyone. With addition of Filters it's my first line of defense against ads. It enables you to filter links, adds, flash and ActiveX from websites using blacklists and...